"Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide" by Linda Grey Sexton - Writings & Rantings #1

So this second memoir choice of mine comes from the recommendation of it given by none other than the incomparable Fayzo. Even if it's another memoir about writers and suicide, I think I'll have a lot more room for comparisons and contrasts with this than I would anything else.

Dear God. I have never been more captivated by a story in the first twenty pages of book in my life. Or if I have, it hasn't hit nearly as close to home as this. Walking into this story, we the readers get a nice little, "Hi how are you this is who I am" from the author, Linda Grey Sexton. She explains why she writes this book with the topic and themes of suicide, and why it's important to read. By page 7, we're reliving her first attempt at suicide and my stomach is churning and I'm crying as I listen to Linda scold herself, reliving those moments, and how successful she almost was. Somewhere along the lines, Linda essentially gives kudos to her mother for having the guts to actually kill herself without ever using a blade on her skin. (I've yet to discover how Anne Sexton took her life, but I'm avoiding Wikipedia and Google like the plague-- I'm too interested in this story to allow outside opinions to affect my reading this story.)

And from that horrific memory that she has the guts to share, we're brought to a time when Linda was in her twenties, and how life continues moving forward even with her mothers' death. It's just in the likeness of one rant I've gone on multiple times-- how time moves forward, whether we wish it to be faster or want for it to slow, maybe even stop altogether. UnFortunately for us, time stops for neither Man nor Animal nor Gods or any other being; but with time also comes change. And the thing is, change is hard-- but it makes it worth it. It makes life... real.

Sexton recalls how her mother had said to her on multiple occasions to "Never be a writer", but not once had she said "Never be a suicide". Honestly, I haven't gotten exactly to the point where I'd say being a writer is a terrible thing to wish upon someone-- but it is hard. Just like a sport, writing is a skill, and when you may be the only one staring a piece of work down and reading it over twenty times, you are your worst critic. Linda calls the legacy her mother left her "the compulsion to create with words". I find truth in that description. It's often how I don't finish school work, or why I quit studying for an examination-- I've got too many thoughts running in crazed patterns through my mind to find a way to pen them all down before they escape into nothingness. I'm so concerned that the one thought I can't get out will turn into a 'would have been my best' or something like that. Revision after revision after revision and then some more-- I'll always want to change something. It'll never be good enough for me, or when it is, I won't know what to do next. It may seem odd, but truthfully, it's what I love about writing the most.